iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

I have been using the sound studio in the public library to record screencasts. It is a fantastic resource. I am not sure it has saved me $70K this year, but it certainly is valuable! #library #soundstudio

The following items were checked out by you on Friday, October 16, 2026 12:14:10 PM from Central Santa Rosa Library

Item: 37565040454596
Title: E Street Studio. Small room : Central branch.
Due: 10/16/2026 4:11:37 PM

Total items: 1

You just saved $8,124.43 by using your library. You have saved $70,718.14 this past year and $70,718.14 since you began using the library!

Account summary
Items out: 1
Hold requests: 0
Items held: 0
Charges: $0.00

Thank You!

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 06/10/2026

Both ends of the former Gleason Beach, on the now-bypassed stretch of highway 1. In the dozen years I've been here, homes in the middle fell off the crumbling edge of the continent and those in both photos were abandoned. It is a good place to take a short […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

People have been asking for a video demo of Bram. The struggle was lack of tool support for a Heavy Metal Umlaut style of recording that overlays narration and edits on a playable base layer. So I'm building Bram Studio. Here it is (sound up) testing some new […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

This was beautifully built, I wish I could see it in action.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

Passing through Bend, Oregon, I took a walk along the river and met a coven of vampires who asked me to capture a photo of them on one of their phones. Then they returned the favor. #vampire

vampire coven in drake's part, bend, oregon

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Today I learned that Lake Siskiyou is basically a big flood control bucket that empties and fills seasonally. Weird to walk there when empty.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

Bram now indexes and searches: - Claude Code and Codex session files - Bram's own worklist history - GitHub issues - GitHub commits The same SQLite FTS5 search works interactively and as a tool that agents can call. Software archeology is now running on […] [Original post on social.coop]

After the #171 fix, our live probe confused us: the fix didn’t fire, the iterate arrived in a shape the conventions said shouldn’t exist, and neither of us could remember why #171 had mattered.

Three searches reconstructed the story. A /__search on iterate/drain surfaced commit 06620ca, whose message explained the original reason: toTurn collapses whitespace and terminal UIs truncate large pastes, so #144 moved long feedback into drafts. Old sessions showed that code running and later feedbackRef payloads on the wire. Targeted greps then showed what had changed: the worklist2 rewrite created the gate’s Iterate as a new inline function, while the drain survived only in Queue. Nobody had intentionally made that split.

The causal chain became clear: #144’s drain was necessary → it blinded the opt-out (#170) → #171 followed → the August rewrite accidentally forked the shape → #171 still protected Queue, while gate silently re-exposed #144’s mangling.

That reconstruction produced #285, then the approved fix: gate now drafts like Queue, the host matcher reads drafts (also closing #284), and conventions now match reality (a758e79). An A/B probe against both wire shapes verified each allow mechanism and byte-for-byte whitespace fidelity. #171, #284, and #285 close together because they were one story all along.

Bram searching sessions, commits, issues, history

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 14/08/2026

"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030." […] [Original post on social.coop]

https://social.coop/@judell/114164295931906712

Mass murderers: Hitler, Pol Pot, Musk

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

A friend found my name (almost, John not Jon) carved into a rock at El Morro, New Mexico. I looked it up, he was a well-known "diarist of the American frontier". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Udell

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026

"In a talk at the Open Education Conference I cited open source software development as a model for observable work. Because the processes and products yield digital artifacts, anyone can learn how the work is done and — if motivated — become a participant […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 16/07/2026

When I publish a blog post, a growing flock of idiotic bots pile on instantly. Fastmail's filters aren't smart enough to recognize this slop and route it to spam. There are so many useless AI features that nobody wants, that's one I would welcome.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026

@dashdashado Finally resolved. How do you suppose this happened? And for how long do you think it might've gone unnoticed?

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 11/07/2026

This wiring cabinet at the Silver Spring metro has been hanging open for a couple days. Paging @dashdashado.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

If you need a coworking space in Silver Spring, Kaldi's Social House is the place to go. I have no idea if the story about the Ethiopian goatherder is true but I like to think that it is. #coffee

kaldi's social house inspired by ethiopian goatherder

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

In simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/3/judgem…, @simon showed me how to get Fable to delegate: "For all coding tasks use your judgement to decide an appropriate lower power model and run that in a subagent" Doing that helped me bootstrap viewing of subagent […] [Original post on social.coop]

Fable picking Sonnet or Haikui according to task.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/05/2026

The 75 mile stretch of Hwy 1 from Carmel to Ragged Point was closed for 3 years, now open since January. Who knows for how long this impossibly beautiful and vulnerable road will remain drivable? I figured don't wait, do it now. Nice spot for a working/hiking […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

Two lizards locked in a death struggle, neither survived. #lizard #gladiators

two lizards locked in a death struggle neither one survived

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 07/05/2026

I normally feel sympathetic when I see a car with a parking ticket. In this case, not so much. #cybertruck #schadenfreude

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 22/04/2026

The community calendar pipeline was getting hard for me to understand, this interactive explainer helps. judell.github.io/cc-architecture This way of using XMLUI to visualize process and flow needs packaging and refinement, but it feels promising […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 10/04/2026

After a 2-hour walk during which I talked to Claude about an upcoming piece of development I met friends for dinner and forgot to end the session. Claude was listening to our conversation and trying to make sense of it. Later I opened my laptop to a touching expression of concern.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 03/04/2026

I'm gonna guess that I.M. Pei, who designed these crooked steps, never had to walk up and down them.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 03/04/2026

I am a fan of quirky civic statuary. Austin has Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bloomington has Captain Janeway.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 13/03/2026

It was easy to create a scraper so now @indivisibleteam events show up on the Santa Rosa calendar and can for other cities too. Seems like there should be an API though? Please lmk if there's one I missed and I'll switch to it. #indivisible #resistance #calendar […] [Original post on social.coop]

It was easy to create a scraper so now @indivisibleteam@mastodon.social events show up on the Santa Rosa calendar and can for other cities too. Seems like there should be an API though? Please lmk if there's one I missed and I'll switch to it.

#indivisible #resistance #calendar

https://github.com/judell/community-calendar

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 09/03/2026

We were surprised to encounter the Knights of Nii at the top of Mt. Barnabe.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

It's almost like the NYT is admitting how badly they failed us and are belatedly trying to atone. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/22/opinion/…

Since then, one red line after another has been crossed: Undocumented immigrants are called animals; civilian boats are blown out of the water; American citizens are gunned down in the streets and then accused of being domestic terrorists; universities, news organizations and law firms are being bullied and blackmailed; and refugees are deported to countries whose languages they probably don’t even speak. And that is aside from the blatant corruption of family and cronies.

All this was incremental, too, but compared with 1934, everything goes much faster. And yet life continues as usual. What was unthinkable only yesterday we now take in stride, and we wait for that moment when things really have gone too far this time, when the fever breaks and things will revert to normal.
But that moment probably won’t come. Things have gone too far too many times already. Hoping for better is still the right attitude, but only as long as we prepare for the worst.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 21/02/2026

When reading Greg's explainers I have always wished I could animate them. Despite a lifetime in software my brain doesn't translate Python code expressing a CRDT algorithm into a machine I can see advance step by step. Looks like that wish is coming true […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 12/02/2026

RIP Robert Tinney. This is Collector Edition #14, number 349 of 500, signed by you. I wonder who the other 499 are. #BYTE mastodon.social/@bsletten/116055333…

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 26/01/2026

TIL I learned that newly-issued US passports no longer have pages for the rubberstamps my old ones accumulated. The passport I just renewed was issued in March 2016, in a very different United States of America.

old-school US passport with stamped pages

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 17/01/2026

Expecting the inevitable I've been playing the long game using Skymoth to reflect my Mastodon posts unidirectionally to Bluesky and fed.brid.gy for two-way interaction. It's a mess, tbh. I made this page to make the bridge easier to use […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 16/01/2026

This is high on the list of the most fun a headline writer could ever have.

Man whose gut made its own alcohol gets relief from faecal transplant

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 31/12/2025

"The poster child for big beautiful clean coal." Playing on a loop at the Department of Energy.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 18/12/2025

On the Kortum Trail above Wright's Beach, I looked down and saw a man on one knee slipping an engagement ring onto a woman's hand. They are just barely visible in this photo taken a minute later, but if you happen to know them, they might want to see it.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/11/2025

Just a typical item in today's news that would, as recently as 2015, have seemed like a passage from a work of dystopian fiction.

A Coast Guard official who had seen the new wording called the policy changes chilling.
“We don’t deserve the trust of the nation if we’re unclear about the divisiveness of swastikas,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to a fear of reprisal.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 10/11/2025

Well this is the coolest BYTE archive ever. The home page, a grid with cover pages down the left side, functions as an infographic that charts the rise and fall of the magazine. (I arrived long after the glory days of 450-page issues.) "This zoomable map shows […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 03/11/2025

"The tractor beam that pulled me in was the special exhibit of Ray Harryhausen’s orginal animatronic models and drawings. Here’s the Kraken from Clash of the Titans." blog.jonudell.net/2025/11/02/releas… #Miniatures #HarryHausen #Dynamation

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2025

This lovely paean to the roundabouts in my former home town omits the traffic disaster at Keene's core. Central Square (which is a circle) awkwardly combines a roundabout with intersections and traffic lights: the worst of both worlds. I love you anyway, Keene! […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2025

"There are protests next Saturday. Humanity will be there. The fascists are saying it will be a terrorist gathering, a criminal conspiracy, a violent uprising. So let's be criminals, by which I mean let's be antifascists, by which I mean let's be humans. Let's […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2025

I updated the post: we found a 1972 Institut Géographique National map in a drawer. It doesn't show the A20 but who cares, it is a glorious representation of this region.

The missing map: part of the Dordogne valley at 1:25000

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2025

"The demonstration is widely considered to be the longest continuous act of political protest in U.S. history. It has survived seven presidents, countless global conflicts, hurricanes and blizzards, heat waves and floods. It has outlasted several U.S. wars […] [Original post on social.coop]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/11/peace-vigil-congressman-letter/

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2025

@Downes Good point. Let's do both, eh? Punish the cowards and reward the heroes. That was the idea here, fwiw. jonudell.info/ShopCostcoBoycottTarg…

Shop Costco, Boycott Target
Support companies that stand by their commitment to diversity

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2025

Here's how to make an XMLUI table responsive: docs.xmlui.org/howto/make-a-table-r… I just added the example to the Howto section in the docs. Now when I ask an agent how to do this, the XMLUI MCP server should guide the agent to the working […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2025

The #PickettFire near Calistoga from Taylor Mountain in Santa Rosa.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2025

I asked Claude and ChatGPT to react to this chart. Both initially applauded. I told them to read Tufte and reconsider. Both regurgitated Tufteisms but missed the main flaw. I told them they missed the main flaw. Finally they got it: The Lie Factor. "The […] [Original post on social.coop]

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2025

At the end of a long ride, low on energy, those blackberries really hit the spot.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2025

Listening to Jim Croce tunes reminds me of the powerful internal rhythm of his lyrics. It's impossible to unhear this one but if you could, and just said the words, I bet you'd arrive at a very similar rhythmic pattern.

You don't tug on Superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 02/05/2025

Excellent news. This is how to do it: carrot and stick. Reward integrity, shun cowards. #boycott jonudell.info/ShopCostcoBoycottTarg…

Simpson Thacher reached a deal with the White House last month in which the firm committed to perform $125 million in free legal work for causes acceptable to the Trump administration. In a joint statement with other firms making similar agreements, Simpson Thacher said the pro bono work would be on behalf of “a wide range of underserved populations.”

On the same day that the Simpson Thacher lawyers filed paperwork withdrawing from the Microsoft case, at least three partners at the firm Jenner & Block informed the court that they would be representing Microsoft in the case. Jenner is fighting in court to permanently block a Trump administration executive order targeting its business.

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Jon Udell @judell.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 01/05/2025

"In the span of some 80 years and five decades, this family emerged from poverty in a hostile country to become a prosperous, educated clan of merchants, scholars, professionals, and, most important, American citizens. What does this classically American tale […] [Original post on social.coop]

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